The languid remnants of the metal men left a heat in his chest that now burned distinctly, for his limbs were lavished in an icy chill as he woke. His apartment had grown colder still over the course of his sleep. The glass of water that he maintained at his bedside was freezing over, and as he staggered to his sink to refresh the glass with a shivering grip, he found his tap would hardly budge. He found also that the ventilation in the apartment had ceased to function. His head was throbbing, and he wobbled on his feet, feeling queasy. The anxiety both from his experiences and his dreams, accompanied now with palpitations of his chest, were ever present, and increasing. He was beginning to doubt the quality of the pills his employers had prescribed him for “likely occupational stress”.

He swallowed his pills all the same and turned to his misted, creaking window. It appeared as if the waking world had been held in limbo from since he had last departed it, for no sunlight trickled through to brighten his pallid place. Instead, a thick gluttonous cloud sank sordidly down into the city, sludging through cracks in the rows of rigid monoliths and slobbering over the groaning glass. The only light that shone to meet his eyes was the jittering bulbs of neon from far off vehicles, which ploughed through the smog that was now more condensed within the urban air than since he had first conjoined with the city. Occasionally, he would observe a flickering flash of light from a distant window of another apartment, as if the other lonesome men of this tenebrous city were desperately communicating in a frail network of Morse code. The more he stood and observed the fluidly fluctuating lights of the other urban folk, the more he acquired the eerie sense of some queer orchestration, as if his companions in this land of increasingly plutonian atmosphere were not men but robotic imposters, churning through a congested chain of pre-ordained sequences.

For all the detachment that the city gifted him from the physical and emotional intimacy of others, it was as if he was being coded into the very neural structures of his neighbors, that they would share every sensory stimulation and unite to assemble each as a scale upon another fleshy scale, functioning as merely the sensory membrane of a great autonomous arm that twitched and strained and prodded of its own apathetic accord. It was an intimacy of its own nature, too abstract to be boonful, yet too overshadowing to retreat from. At least, he felt, for all this emancipating loneliness was an infliction, he did not have to be relied upon. There was a comfort, particularly given his current neurosis, in knowing that with or without him, the city would live on.

It was perhaps for this reason that he elected to, for a moment, shirk his duty to his employers. Given the experiences of the previous night, he felt it prudent to journey to the forest not far from his home, keeping his head down and trying not to become disoriented in the gathering fog as he did so, a task made increasingly challenging by the throbbing of the head that had persisted since his waking. Despite the icy character of his apartment, he found that the city’s air was, if anything, more humid than before, so clogged and clotted as it was with the sticky smog that laced around every lamppost and lashed out at the rumbling cars that seemed to veer all the more frantically around every corner. However, it was when he left the heart of the city that he was greeted with the unhallowed wind once more, chilling his aching bones and forcing him to cloak himself in his trench coat and form a cocoon against the sudden blast of cold. Walking still onward, he saw that the fog had now utterly vanished, as if he had trespassed through a vaporial portal into a different, less dreary world. Though the frost in the air made it somewhat harsh on the lungs, there was still a palpable pleasantness to it, and it seemed that in accordance with this that the trees that loomed beyond the outskirts of the city were taller than since he had last remembered. As he walked down the ever-crumbling road towards the woodland area, he saw that roots were snaking like fierce pythons upon the concrete, yet even as he gazed down at them, he saw a tar-like rot slithering upon them, as if some primordial war was waging beneath his feet. It appeared that the trees were commencing to crawl closer to the city, yet as they did so, were met by an inexplicable barricade of decay and death.

Now, as he stood atop a raised meadow of high, howling grass, overlooking the forest, he turned back once more towards the city, only to hear, and soon see, a rushing, roaring black dagger swipe across the air and pummel itself into the urban fog. The train was gone as soon as he recognised it, obscured within the thick miasmic cloud that wrapped around the city like its own personal stratosphere. The neon lights still scorched through the fog however, sparkling through the haze like some foreign glitter, shifting in colour and drifting up and down and side to side like the observing eye of some airborne alien that hid within the clouds. The way the light danced delightedly within the fog and among the mighty metal obelisks, and how it fragmented itself into a thousand kaleidoscopic reflections of glaring colour upon the fleshy glass of these geometric structures, possessed a strange, enchanting quality. In this moment it almost had the power of sucking him back into the city, impeding him on his journey. Yet the wind battered him once more and nearly shook him off his feet in his unawareness, so he returned on his trek down to the shadowy woodland with haste.

Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

Though the forest was as densely packed as any, he was surprised to find a great many stumps of dead, stolen trees, that protruded like an infected gash out of the moss below. He observed them increasingly with the further he went into the forest, finding it to resemble that of an unkempt graveyard, with rugged graves of oak whose ancestral headstones displayed foreign carvings that had been etched into the bark some great many eons ago. It was as if the forest had once been decapitated, only to have risen up again and marched forth from its burial ground. And, though the fog had dissipated, there were thin tendrils of mist that swam like hovering snakes between the trunks of the trees and seemed to whisper within the gusts of wind like the flutes of forgotten lands. They were of a thick, web-like quality, that left droplets atop the waving grass, as if this mist was not a mist at all but a ghostly gardener that now watered its formidable floral fortress.

Despite the mist and the wind however, the forest was deathly still. The flora of the place, though alive, was gaunt and tarnished with shadow, seeming zombified in the silver half-light that dripped down into where he now stood. Neither bird nor insect was to be seen or heard. Nevertheless, the river flowed intensely, and soon he found himself standing before it, as if he had returned once more to his mystic dreamland. There were no bickering blossoms, nor the whispers of far-off phantasms, to encroach upon his ears this time, however. The aching in his bones and the migraine he had been carrying from since he awoke were beginning to subside, and he knelt down to the river, to look upon his reflection. He saw his corpse-like face and his pale, wrinkled eyes, and he grimaced. He could bear not a glance more at this corrupted visage. He knelt further downwards, tilting his face away from the stream so that he gazed sideways across the river. With the icy water lapping at his ear, he let out a faint murmur to be carried far off into a land he did not know. Despite himself and his agnostic nature, he hoped the river would carry his prayer well, to whoever could heed it.

Shuddering in shame at his moment of distraction, he bent back upright before cupping some of the icy water in his hands. He had not drank all day, and so he drank the crystalline liquid with haste. It tasted different to the water he had become accustomed to, perhaps not surprisingly, however he was struck by the sheer significance of the disparity. It was marvelously lighter, soft as silk, and had a slight flavour he could pinpoint as that of grape juice, of which he had seen still somehow grew in this mystic forest. Something about it was energising in the way that the hard, acidic water he drank from his tap had not been, and almost as soon as he felt this, he felt his ailments further subside. His head grew clearer, and as he stood, he felt that he was truly awake for the first time since the cloud had come down over the city. This, however, he knew to mean only one thing. He must get to work.

Just as he set to leave this strikingly placid forest however, something vibrated in his pocket. His phone was ringing. His employers had never called him unless they, with their omnipresent eyes, knew he had received his latest assignment. He raised the phone tentatively to his ear.

At first, he heard nothing, not even static, only his own breathing. Then, amidst the silence of the forest, he noticed something. His was not the only breathing he could hear. With a chill, he glanced around himself quickly, for he could not quite discern if the breathing he heard originated from his phone, or from somewhere around him in the forest. Amidst the blackened tree trunks and the tendrilous branches, and as the daylight grew slighter still, his mind galloped frantically, and in his sudden swivels upon the ground to pinpoint the noise he could swear he could see the dashing blotches of silhouettes of many figures, watching him. But he calmed himself, slowing his heartbeat, breathing delicately, just as his wife had taught him for aiding his bouts of panic. Soon, there were no figures that he could see beside his own that were standing in the static woodland. Yet he could still hear the breathing, and it was matching his own tempo. He was about to conclude that it was in fact only his own breathing, and that he had heard in some sort of mental hallucination, and thus turn off his phone, as another noise approached him. It was a sigh, light at first, then it grew heavier, before repeating itself. It grew in volume and momentum, before soon a cacophony enveloped him, now of unrelenting shrieks, piercing and maniacal, dancing around him. The noise leapt from tree to tree, whipping through the withering branches, mocking him, propelling him into a drunkard spin as he sought to locate the source with eyes stinging and his brain throbbing once more. It felt as though the once serene setting was now turning with anger against him, the sharp black branches lashing downwards to where he stood, cracking like whips. Yet, with a sudden jolt of energy, he relinquished himself from his trance and turned off his phone with a shudder. The screams had been an agony to him, and a cold sweat had now spread over his pallid features like a plague. He brushed his brow and breathed slowly once more, still glancing over his shoulders. As soon as he had turned off the phone, the screams had dissipated, and the woodland was calm once more, but an unpalatable atmosphere remained. With a shudder, he hurried off back to the homely humidity of the city, where it was too shrouded to spy shadows in the dark.